Paul
Jenkins, a colorful Abstract Expressionist who came of age during the
heyday of the New York School and for several decades carried on its highly
physical tradition of manipulating paint and canvas, died on June 9 in
Manhattan, where he lived and had continued to paint until recently. He was 88.
He died after a short illness, said his wife, Suzanne.
In the late 1940s, joining a wave of aspiring painters
moving to New York, Mr. Jenkins used the G.I. Bill to study at the Art Students
League and soon met Jackson Pollock and befriended Mark Rothko. In 1953 he
resettled in Paris, but maintained a lifelong connection with New York.
Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of
painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint
Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and
he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas — “as if it were a sail,” he said
once. His favorite tool for many years was an elegant ivory knife, which he
used to guide the flow of paint.
The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic
landscapes or what Stuart Preston, reviewing his work in The New York Times in
1958, described as “Abstract Expressionist rococo.” Influenced by the theories
of Jung and by the visionary imagery of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.
“I have conversations
with them,” he said of his paintings, “and they tell me what they want to be
called.”
His work attracted collectors and museums in the United
States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where, with his flowing hair
and beard — a friend said he looked like Charlton Heston’s Moses — he seemed to
embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and
’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more
a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their
own good.”
William Paul Jenkins was born — during a lightning storm, according
to his official biography — in Kansas City, Mo., on July 12, 1923. As a boy, he
met both Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. (Wright suggested that he
should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.) He worked weekends
at a ceramics factory, where watching the master mold-maker’s handling of shape
and color, he said, had a profound effect on his ideas about painting.
By the 1970s and ’80s, his art career had provided him with
a glamorous life, divided between France, where his work graced a Pierre Cardin
boutique, and New York, where he kept an airy loft near Union Square that had
previously belonged to Willem de Kooning. The first lady of France, Danielle
Mitterrand, once visited the studio, and the party he gave for her was attended
by guests like Paloma Picasso, Robert Motherwell and Berenice Abbott.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Jenkins is survived by his
daughter, Hilarie Jenkins.
In 1971, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San
Francisco Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Jenkins’s work. But he
got much more exposure in 1978, when his paintings had a starring role in the
Paul Mazursky movie “An Unmarried Woman,”
in which Alan Bates plays a smoldering, heavily bearded Manhattan artist. The
paintings supposedly done by the Bates character were actually his work.
Mr. Jenkins spent weeks teaching Mr. Bates how to approximate
his methods of paint-pouring and canvas-wrestling, a way of making art that he
described as tempting fate.
“I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing
past experience and my knowledge of the odds,” he said in 1964. “It’s a big gamble,
and that’s why I love it.”
From Print- New York Times, June 17th 2012
